Fractal aims to take the table pain out of emails by turning HTML into nested tables quickly

If you’ve ever prepared an email for distribution and tried to make it both attractive and informative, you may be familiar with the need to mess around with tables.

Fresh startup Fractal would like you to forget about that and give their service a try which it says will sort all that out for you. The good news today is that company’s API is now open for email marketing service providers to integrate and it is adding iPhone/iPad and Android email previewing.

Emails can be coded in the same way as a web page, using divs, floats and margins as you might expect and then the Fractal service turns an HTML email into nested tables.

Once Fractal has converted your div layout into a table structure, it then applies email client quirk fixes to the resulting HTML. These deal with display issues relating to Hotmail, Microsoft Outlook and more.

Taking issues of fragmentation out of any process is a neat trick and if you’re running more than one email list, this might be something you would consider to make life for the inbox a bit easier.

Fractal was established last year and has seen the support of TAG and Imperial Innovations and was a winner of Mini SeedCamp London all of which has helped to push the service to grow and evolved.

The company’s origins appear to lie in a form of design envy it says on its site:

“As email designers, we envy our fellow web designers as they get to use a div structure to design web pages. They can pretty much mock up anything they want really quickly while we’re still trying to work out if we should nest this table in this cell or not. Aaah! So we thought, web designers shouldn’t be the only ones to live the sweet life so we created a div to table converter.”

iPhone and Android previews will also be available soon so that creators can see how the final product will appear for readers on the move. A handy feature as most people now check their emails over mobile devices. If your mail shots are not mobile compatible, you can probably expect reader to unsubscribe before long.

Most people today find email management difficult and it doesn’t take much to lose a subscriber if your email has too many faults. Fractal hopes that with its latest releases that some of the processes of creating useful email for distribution will become easier and in turn, help to retain readers by presenting something appealing.

➤ Fractal

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